Saturday, April 11, 2015

(CN) - People who send
text messages to motorists may be found liable for road accidents that
occur from texting and driving, a New Jersey appeals court ruled.
Drivers in the Garden State already face jail time if they cause a serious accident while texting behind the wheel.
The
Jersey City, N.J., panel handed down the new standard in a case where a
couple on a motorcycle each lost their left legs after they were
sideswiped by a texting teenager.
Kyle Best had been 18 years
old on Sept. 21, 2009, when he crossed the center line of road in Mine
Hill, N.J., in his Chevy pickup and plowed into the motorcycle carrying
husband and wife Linda and David Kubert.
Just seconds before the
accident, phone records showed that Best had had been texting with his
friend Shannon Colonna, 17 at that time.
After Best settled, the
Kuberts claimed Colonna aided and abetted Best by distracting him with
texts. The trial judge nevertheless placed the onus on Best's negligent
driving, finding the girl did not have a legal duty stop texting, even
if she knew Best was behind the wheel of the truck.
A three-judge panel of the Appellate Division reversed Tuesday.
"We
hold that, when a texter knows or has special reason to know that the
intended recipient is driving and is likely to read the text message
while driving, the texter has a duty to users of the public roads to
refrain from sending the driver a text at that time," Judge Victor
Ashrafi wrote for the panel.
The 30-page opinion lets Colonna
off the hook because it was not clear if she knew Best would read the
one text she had sent while he was driving the Chevy.
Phone
records showed that Best and Colonna texted 62 times on the day of the
collision, though contents of their messages are missing from the
evidence.
"The evidence of multiple texting at other times when
Best was not driving did not prove that Colonna breached the limited
duty we have described," Ashrafi wrote.
Colonna testified that she texts 100 times each day.
"I'm a young teenager. That's what we do," Colonna said during a deposition, according to the ruling.
The
panel ruled out holding cellphone companies liable for not designing
nondistracting features for their products. That would open the
floodgates to product liability against not just cell phone makers but
manufacturers of things like radios or GPS devices, according to the
ruling.
Judge Michael Guadagno and Judge Marianne Espinosa
joined Ashrafi's opinion. But Espinoza suggested in a 10-page
concurrence that the court had gone too far, and that tort law already
covers such matters.
"I do not agree that it is necessary for us
to articulate a new duty specific to persons in remote locations who
send text messages to drivers, and I part company with my colleagues in
their analysis of the duty imposed," the judge wrote.
Slate's
Emily Bazelon was skeptical of the new ruling. She noted that 41 states
have some kind of ban on texting and driving, but that studies showed
that universal bans on all cellphone use are most effective.
"Passing
stiffer state laws to crack down on drivers is more logical and useful
than imposing liability on texters who are not in the car, like Shannon
Colonna," Bazelon wrote. "The New Jersey judges, though, can be forgiven
their howl of frustration. Texting while driving is such a massive and
bedeviling problem that it's natural to look beyond drivers to solve it.
In the end, though, this is really about them."